The Flight Attendant, series 2 review — Kaley Cuoco returns as a magnetic, mysterious heroine

The last time we met Kaley Cuoco’s alcoholic flight attendant Cassie, she had woken up in a Bangkok hotel room next to a bloody corpse. Unable to recall the events of the night before, Cassie turned detective, uncovering a plot involving missing money, a copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and a lethal British assassin. Fast-forward a year, and Cassie has started a new life in Los Angeles, dutifully attending AA meetings. She has a side-hustle as a “human asset” for the CIA, furtively photographing persons of interest during international layovers.

The second series of The Flight Attendant marks a departure both from the source material — series one was based on Chris Bohjalian’s 2018 novel of the same name — and from common-sense plotting. On a job in Berlin, Cassie follows her latest mark while wearing a bright red overcoat and loudly tripping over passers-by. She couldn’t be more conspicuous if she were to put on a fireworks display spelling out “C-I-A”. Things take a turn early on when her quarry is blown up in the street. Her boss blames a gas leak but Cassie insists it was a bomb planted by a woman who, in a Hitchcockian twist, appears to be her double, right down to the moth tattoo on her back.

Given the neat narrative arc of the first series, a second helping — which features a refreshed cast including Sharon Stone and Feel Good’s Mae Martin — was always going to be something of a leap. The credulity is stretched by Cassie’s recruitment as a civilian spook by one of her colleagues who, having barely uttered two words in series one, turns out to have been a spy all along.

Matters aren’t helped by the split-screen sequences that exist for no other reason than to give the project a retro sheen. But despite the implausibilities and some whiplash-inducing tonal shifts — the series careens from screwball comedy to high-stakes thriller to heart-tugging childhood drama and back again — Cuoco’s Cassie remains a magnetic heroine forever on the precipice of calamity.

Where previously Cassie was given to holding hallucinatory conversations with her dead lover, here she is assailed by iterations of her past self, from the withering teenager who would share a case of beer with her father, and the adult party girl three sheets to the wind in a sequinned dress, to a later mascara-smudged version who has reached rock bottom. These subconscious Cassies each do their utmost to blow up what her best friend Annie (Zosia Mamet) calls her “perfect, I-have-vegetables-in-the-fridge life”.

There are doubtless more subtle ways to show us a character at war with herself, though it’s these scenes that give the show a genuine sense of peril. In the face of Cassie’s precarious inner life, the bombs, baddies and body doubles are just background noise.

★★★☆☆

On Sky Max and Now from May 26